Norman Rockwell sketches once displayed at White House headed for auction

Four related sketches by artist Norman Rockwell that were displayed at the White House for decades will be auctioned off next month.

The series, titled “So You Want to See the President!,” depicts members of the media, foreign and domestic military officials, Sens. Tom Connally and Warren Austin and others waiting to see President Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to the lot listing from Heritage Auctions.

The full set ran in the Nov. 13, 1943, edition of The Saturday Evening Post, and afterward Rockwell gave the sketches to Roosevelt’s press secretary, Stephen Early, who is also depicted in the series, Heritage Auctions said.

After Early’s death in 1951, his widow displayed them in her Alexandria, Virginia, home, and they were later lent to the White House for display in 1978, according to The New York Times.

In 2017, a legal dispute among Early’s descendants over who should rightfully own the sketches broke out when his son Thomas Early noticed them in the background of a video of President Trump being interviewed at the White House. 

Some members of the extended family accused the press secretary’s grandson William Nile Elam III of sending the sketches to the White House in order to authenticate his claim to the sketches, reported the NYT.

The sketches were removed from the White House amid the dispute in 2022, and a federal judge upheld Mr. Elam’s line of ownership in 2023.

The sketches will go to auction live in Dallas and remotely on Nov. 14. The starting bid for the sketches is $2 million, and Heritage Auctions expects them to garner a final offer of $4 million to $6 million.